The long-sought Higgs boson—the particle that endows all elementary particles in the universe with mass—was elusive no longer when scientists at the CERN physics laboratory in Switzerland, discovered it last summer.
The July 4, 2012 announcement of the discovery appealed to both the general public and the media: Fifty-five media organizations and more than one billion television viewers made it an event that couldn’t be missed. Time even dubbed the Higgs boson “Particle of the Year.” (more…)
ANN ARBOR — A carbon-nanotube-coated lens that converts light to sound can focus high-pressure sound waves to finer points than ever before. The University of Michigan engineering researchers who developed the new therapeutic ultrasound approach say it could lead to an invisible knife for noninvasive surgery.
Today’s ultrasound technology enables far more than glimpses into the womb. Doctors routinely use focused sound waves to blast apart kidney stones and prostate tumors, for example. The tools work primarily by focusing sound waves tightly enough to generate heat, says Jay Guo, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, mechanical engineering, and macromolecular science and engineering. Guo is a co-author of a paper on the new technique published in the current issue of Nature’s journal Scientific Reports. (more…)
A new study published by University of Chicago researchers challenges the notion that the force of an exploding star prompted the formation of the solar system.
In this study, published online last month in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, authors Haolan Tang and Nicolas Dauphas found the radioactive isotope iron 60 — the telltale sign of an exploding star—low in abundance and well mixed in solar system material. As cosmochemists, they look for remnants of stellar explosions in meteorites to help determine the conditions under which the solar system formed. (more…)
A Yale-led scientific team has produced the most comprehensive family tree for birds to date, connecting all living bird species — nearly 10,000 in total — and revealing surprising new details about their evolutionary history and its geographic context.
Analysis of the family tree shows when and where birds diversified — and that birds’ diversification rate has increased over the last 50 million years, challenging the conventional wisdom of biodiversity experts.
“It’s the first time that we have — for such a large group of species and with such a high degree of confidence — the full global picture of diversification in time and space,” said biologist Walter Jetz of Yale, lead author of the team’s research paper, published Oct. 31 online in the journal Nature. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Transportation practices tend to be more environmentally friendly in wealthier metropolitan areas located within states that mandate comprehensive planning, new research suggests.
The study involved an examination of 225 U.S. metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2008 to gauge how sustainable their transportation practices were and determine what kinds of socioeconomic factors appeared to influence those practices. (more…)
University of Missouri’s Sergei Kopeikin may have solved the Pioneer anomaly
COLUMBIA, Mo. – Former President Bill Clinton recently expressed his support for interstellar travel at the 100 Year Spaceship Symposium, an international event advocating for human expansion into other star systems. Interstellar travel will depend upon extremely precise measurements of every factor involved in the mission. The knowledge of those factors may be improved by the solution a University of Missouri researcher found to a puzzle that has stumped astrophysicists for decades.
“The Pioneer spacecraft, two probes launched into space in the early 70s, seemed to violate the Newtonian law of gravity by decelerating anomalously as they traveled, but there was nothing in physics to explain why this happened,” said Sergei Kopeikin, professor of physics and astronomy in MU’s College of Arts and Science. “My study suggests that this so-called Pioneer anomaly was not anything strange. The confusion can be explained by the effect of the expansion of the universe on the movement of photons that make up light and radio waves.” (more…)
Using a novel method of integrating video technology and familiar control devices, a research team from Georgia Tech and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is developing a technique to simplify remote control of robotic devices.
The researchers’ aim is to enhance a human operator’s ability to perform precise tasks using a multi-jointed robotic device such as an articulated mechanical arm. The new approach has been shown to be easier and faster than older methods, especially when the robot is controlled by an operator who is watching it in a video monitor. (more…)
Berkeley Lab Researchers Propose a Way to Build the First Space-Time Crystal
Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever, even after the heat-death of the universe. This is the “wow” factor behind a device known as a “space-time crystal,” a four-dimensional crystal that has periodic structure in time as well as space. However, there are also practical and important scientific reasons for constructing a space-time crystal. With such a 4D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means by which to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles, the so-called many-body problem of physics. A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances.
A space-time crystal, however, has only existed as a concept in the minds of theoretical scientists with no serious idea as to how to actually build one – until now. An international team of scientists led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has proposed the experimental design of a space-time crystal based on an electric-field ion trap and the Coulomb repulsion of particles that carry the same electrical charge. (more…)
